A Food and (Once & Future) Travel Blog
Looking back at recent posts I notice there are a lot of meat-centric ones. Though I do love cooking meat, curing it, making sausages, etc., I think the recent posts are due more to seasonality. It’s winter, we eat more braises and roasts than salads. That’s not to say vegetables disappear altogether from the table, so this week I decided to post about one we like accompanying our roasts: braised fennel gratin!Continue reading “Braised Fennel Gratin – Yes We Do Eat Vegetables Sometimes”
A little more than a month ago I posted about curing a butchered ham into a fiocco and culatello. At the time I was only able to show you the fiocco since being the smaller of the two it was ready in a shorter amount of time. Well, here we are 5 weeks later and the culatello is finally ready for its grand debut!Continue reading “Culatello – Another Curing Result is In!”
I had a really nice piece of beef sitting in the fridge and wanted to do something a little different with it. Nothing really jumped out at me from the cookbooks I was looking in but I did see a sauce idea for a rather simple version of Bordelaise sauce. So I thought ok, that’ll work but it still doesn’t help me with the beef. Rummaging through the pantry I moved a bag of coffee…and well…there’s where the idea for a coffee rub came from. Sometimes it just hits you.Continue reading “Roast beef with Coffee Rub and Bordelaise Sauce”
I don’t think I had cooked any chicken since before Thanksgiving so this was a refreshing change of pace for us from all of the Christmas/New Year’s overindulging. Now that I think about it, I am pretty sure the last time we had a chicken dinner here at home I made 40 cloves of garlic chicken. It was the first time I tried my hand at it and Cheryl said ‘this would be a good blog post.’ As is often the case, she was correct.Continue reading “40 Cloves of Garlic Chicken With Tarragon Mustard Sauce”
I think this last post of 2015 pretty much sums up my excellent sausage-making year and kicks off the next in an awesome style. Cotechino and lentils is a traditional Italian New Year’s dish served for good luck, much like black-eyed peas here in the US. The lentils are supposed to represent coins, no idea what the large round sausage is supposed to be. Maybe a bigger coin? Regardless of whether or not it brings good fortune, cotechino is a deliciously rich sausage and an excellent New Year’s food tradition. Best part is, I now know how to make them.Continue reading “Cotechino – Buon Anno!”
I’m deep into prepping our Christmas Eve dinner but wanted to share a photo of some salami I made yesterday, some Christmas Charcuterie if you will. Instead of wrapping and putting under the tree, I stuffed and hung them in the curing fridge. Makes quite the Christmas card, no? Should be ready in a month or so, and I hope it turns out well! You’ll know if it does.
Merry Christmas!
When we returned from our Tuscan vacation back in October I was extra-inspired to try curing new things like salumi and hams. Eating prosciutto all week will do that to you. Inspired, yes, but not quite ready to go whole hog (ha ha ha) and hang an entire leg in my basement. Instead, I opted to cut a ham into two smaller, boneless hams, which would be ready to eat much quicker: the culatello and fiocco. Fiocco being the smaller of the two it came out of the curing fridge this week.Continue reading “Culatello and Fiocco – I Am Ham, Ham I Am”
This week’s post was inspired by a bowl of mushroom soup Cheryl had over the weekend at one of our favorite local French restaurants. As is often the case when she orders something really delicious she asks ‘can you make this?’ Of course I can, dear. For you, anything. One pot of creamy mushroom soup coming up!Continue reading “Creamy Mushroom Soup – A Good Winter Warmer”
Ever since I purchased Ruhlman’s Charcuterie years ago I’ve wanted to make Spanish chorizo but it requires dextrose and meat starter culture, two ingredients I never had on hand and had always put off buying. That all changed last month when I decided this coming winter would be the winter of fermented sausage and ordered the necessary ingredients. Chorizo was top of the list as the first sausage to get made.Continue reading “Spanish Chorizo”
Wishing everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving ! Hope you had a great day. Be back next week with an exciting new post.
The Roaming GastroGnome 